Systems and methods herein generally relate to a latch apparatus, and more particularly to a latch apparatus for retaining a flexible circuit cable within a receptacle mounted on a circuit board.
Flexible circuit cables are used extensively in modern electronic devices to provide signal and power connections. Such cables are generally very flat (having a cable width that is much larger relative to the cable thickness). Such flexible circuit cables often maintain separate wires insulated from, and running parallel to, one another with conductive connectors for each of the wires electrically insulated from one another at the ends of the cable.
Low insertion force (LIF) connectors are often used as electronic receptors for such flexible circuit cables because they enable very low insertion forces. More specifically, low insertion force connectors maintain an electrical contact corresponding to each of the conductive connectors at the ends of the flexible circuit cable, and generally have a slot opening that has a thickness approximately equal to (or just slightly larger than) the flexible circuit cable to allow the flexible circuit cable to fit snugly within the slot opening. Such low insertion force connectors utilize frictional forces between the slot and the conductive connectors at the end of the flexible circuit cable to maintain the flexible circuit cable within the slot opening of the low insertion force connector.
In one example, print heads commonly utilize two flexible circuit cables to transmit electrical signals from the head interface control (HIC) board and wave amplifier boards within the print box controller (PBU) to the print head. At the print head, each flexible circuit cable is inserted into separate low insertion force connector soldered to the master printed wire board assembly (PWBA) on the print head. Once inserted within a slot on the low insertion force connectors, the flexible circuit cables are retained in place by frictional forces generated from a light clamping force applied to the thickness of the flexible circuit cables from electrical leads within the low insertion force connectors.
However, in order to make it easy for the user to insert the flexible circuit cable into the low insertion force connectors, sometimes the slot is sized to have a thickness that is large enough to generate low frictional retention forces. If the retention forces are low enough, this can create a substantial risk to physical damage to the device to which the cable is attached due to unintentional cable skew or removal. Therefore, due to the low cable insertion forces enabled by utilization of low insertion force connectors, cable retention force can be compromised.
High retention forces are useful in preventing the flexible circuit cable from inadvertently becoming skewed relative to, or completely decoupled from, the low insertion force connector. In one example, an inkjet printer can utilize 56 print heads with two flexible circuit cables per head, which yields 112 opportunities for failure at this interface, which could result in crossed leads and extensive physical damage to the print head or head interface control and wave amplifier boards within the print box controller.